Alligator Soup

It is Friday, July 24, and the Senate is out for the weekend with Republicans not yet releasing their long-awaited stimulus legislation.

Instead, what did GOP senators do yesterday?

What Republicans Talked About Yesterday

They had a luncheon in the Capitol where the conversation was not dominated by talks of the looming unemployment crisis with the ending FPUC, nothing to be said about the public health crisis or the fact that the federal eviction moratorium is ending soon, what did they talk about?

Alligator soup.

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana hosted the GOP lunch yesterday, and it included alligator soup on the menu.

When asked about what happened during the lunch, did you all talk about the stimulus legislation, Kennedy said, and regarding alligator soup, “It’s very tasty and will make you very regular.”

We’re in the midst of a national public health and economic crisis, we’re here at the eleventh hour, FPUC is ending, federal eviction moratorium is ending, and the senator is talking about the effect of alligator soup on the human colon.

Indiana Senator Mike Braun said, “We talked about alligators, and nutria, and just stories from Louisiana.”

And that’s the way it is.

Stimulus Garnishments

But the Senate did not call it quits for the weekend before doing at least something productive for the people.

Yesterday, the Senate passed by unanimous consent legislation to prevent stimulus payments being garnished by banks.

This bill is not law yet, it must still be passed by the House, which it likely will be, and signed into law by the President about the second stimulus check.

Second Stimulus Check Update

At this point it looks like Republicans will call for a second stimulus check with the same parameters as the first stimulus, $1200 checks, $500 for qualifying dependents under the age of 17, same income limits, we haven’t seen the bill yet, but that’s what it’s looking like right now.

So now we’re at this point where it looks like the democrats idea for the next stimulus check is a $1200 check. And the republicans idea for the next stimulus checks and $1200 check. I’m really curious what all those creators out there who were talking about $2000 a month stimulus for months have to say about that.

Mnuchin said yesterday, that the checks should go out in August, that’s assuming that Congress is able to strike a deal.

We were hoping to see the full Republican bill or bills yesterday, but that wasn’t the case.

Mitch McConnell said on the Senate Floor yesterday that the White House wants more time to review the finer details of the bill so we’ll have to wait until Monday, McConnell threw out Monday as the day when we should see the legislation, he said that various Committee Chairs will unveil particular aspects of the bill.

Democrats have taken every opportunity to criticize their Republican counterparts, with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer issuing this joint statement:

“This weekend, millions of Americans will lose their Unemployment Insurance, will be at risk of being evicted from their homes, and could be laid off by state and local government, and there is only one reason: Republicans have been dithering for months while America’s crisis deepens.

“As our country marks the grave milestone of four million infections, we call upon Leader McConnell to get serious about the needs of working families, stop the unnecessary delays and produce a proposal so that we can sit down and reach an agreement that puts workers and families first. More than two months ago, the House of Representatives passed the Heroes Act: supporting our heroes who risk their lives to save lives and risk losing jobs, crushing the virus with the testing, tracing and treatment to reopen safely and putting money in Americans’ pockets.

“We had expected to be working throughout this weekend to find common ground on the next COVID response package.  It is simply unacceptable that Republicans have had this entire time to reach consensus among themselves and continue to flail.  Time is of the essence and lives are being lost.”

Unemployment Update

However, it appears that to address the looming end of the $600 weekly FPUC unemployment plus-up, Republicans may be open to carving out some kind of reduced weekly benefit as a separate bill because it is obviously extremely urgent.

Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff said that if an agreement on a large, huge stimulus package can’t be reached quickly, then they would consider putting unemployment, school funding, and liability protection into a separate bill to hopefully expedite the process and reduce the lag in weekly federally-funded unemployment benefits.

Just to catch you up on some of the things that I talked about yesterday for unemployment, it looks like the GOP at least according to Mnuchin is aiming for a weekly unemployment benefit of 70% wage replacement.

So according to sources at the Washington Post, what this would mean is that the combined federal and state unemployment would amount to 70% of the individual’s wages.  So 45, 50% would come from the state as usual but then a remaining 20, 25% would come from the feds to hit that 70%.

They haven’t mentioned this, but I’m sure there’s probably some kind of cap here, right, just like there’s a cap on state unemployment benefits, I don’t know if that cap would be $600 or what, but this is kind of what they’re thinking, and I think it’s this aspect here (the unemployment) that’s causing the delay between the White House and Senate Republicans.

Despite rising cases and all this, GOP is generally of the belief that people need to get back to work, and obviously boosted unemployment benefits is antithetical to that goal, so they want to make these benefits as small as possible but still keeping the economy afloat especially for those who don’t have jobs to go back to, so that’s the situation.

I’m not even sure how exactly this will look because obviously we know that state unemployment systems are oftentimes archaic and may not be able to handle this sort of thing on an individual-by-individual basis, but this is where we’re at going into the weekend here.

We know that some Republicans just want to cut it down to a flat rate such as $200 a week, we heard from CNBC sources $100 a week, or something like this rather than tying it to the individual’s prior wage, that would obviously be a lot simpler on state unemployment systems to do something like that, because they struggled to get out a flat $600 weekly, I can only imagine the struggle to get out something on a person-by-person basis that’s tied to their original wages, obviously they do that at the state level but throwing in the federally-funded benefit as well could potentially create problems with some state’s technology.

Needless to say, we’re looking at a fairly significant lag in that unemployment boost for many families, assuming it happens at all.